Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
story of Manso's gradual approach to the life of action and the emotions, but his failure withdraws him
from life once more -again in the double sense. When Manso's story is told, when Galdós has finished
with him, he meekly accepts his creator's dictum (unlike his literary descendent, Unamuno's Augusto
Pérez) and dies without sufficient natural cause and without resistance. Rather than autonomous, he is
its opposite: dependent -the passive agent of Galdós' creative act. Máximo tells Doña Javiera: « He
dado mi fruto y estoy de más » (222). When she claims not to recognize his «fruit», he makes his only
positive statement, but without clarifying its meaning: « Invisible es todo lo grande, toda ley, toda
causa, todo elemento activo » (222). Later he claims -in passages most of which we have already
quoted- to have left little behind him in others, while memory of him has faded rapidly away. The
passivity/ failed activity/return to passivity structure of his story is complete, and he goes back -so
willed by his creator- to what he had called at the beginning the « frío aburrimiento de estos espacios
de la idea » (10), or to what is now seen as sosiego (223) as opposed to the dolor (11) of human life.
The ambiguities of the novel largely evolve from Galdós' capacity for combining opposites and his
related talent for creating dichotomous characters. The latter include those with whose ideas or way of
life Galdós disagrees, but for whom he expresses compassion (Torquemada), and those who are made
ridiculous as people, but whose ideas are close to those of the author (Bailón). Such ambiguity is found
in El amigo Manso , but more problematic still is the question of Manso as narrator (and therefore
interested party) of his own life. Early statements such as « Adquirí cierta presunción pedantesca y
un airecillo de autoridad del que posteriormente, a Dios gracias, me he curado por completo » (15)
are disproved by the remainder of the work and reveal the narrator's unreliability. Clarification of the
matter is of no less importance for El amigo Manso than it is for that other great experiment in first
person narrative voice, Lo prohibido . The temporal perspective of the narrator is also a puzzle in
relation to the above. Manso tells us that he is thirty-five and that the major action he will describe
occurs in the space of a year (11), yet he dies «naturally» at the end. If the entire novel is narrated
after the fact -as it would seems to be- rather than in medias res , interpretative difficulties multiply.
On the night that Manuel had persuaded Manso to accompany him to the buñolería , Máximo's
claim that the education being given his pupil was obviously not taking root is followed by « -¡Oh!,
no -exclamó Peña con vehemencia, dándose una puñada sobre el corazón y un palmetazo en la frente-.
Algo queda. Mucho hay aquí y aquí, maestro, que permanecerá por tiempo infinito. Esta luz no se
extinguirá jamás, y mientras haya espacio, mientras haya tiempo... » (92). Manuel is not speaking
seriously, of course. The setting, the gestures, and the hyperbole make that clear, but Manso's story
makes even clearer that he was occasionally unrealistic enough to believe that the man of thought
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